Billionaires Gnaw Their Tongues From The Pain
Director: Matt Soar
Canada, 2021, 4 min
Shooting Format:35mm, 16mm
Festival Year:2022
Category:Experimental
Genres:Satire, Polemic
Crew:Sound Design: Jackie Gallant
Email:mattsoar@gmail.com
Web:www.lostleaders.ca/billionaires-gnaw-their-tongues-from-the-pain-2021
Synopsis
Billionaires Gnaw Their Tongues From The Pain aka Lost Leaders #22 (2021) is a handmade short, once again created in collaboration with sound artist Jackie Gallant, drummer for Montreal band Lesbians on Ecstasy.
Billionaires... combines 16mm and 35mm 'found’ footage, hand-woven elements, bits and pieces from the earliest days of the Lost Leaders project, and DIY frame-by-frame scanning using a Lego-modded lightbox.
The film is 'inspired’ (read: rocket-fueled) by the hideous spectacle of the richest men in the world pretending to be astronauts. It must take a fuck-ton of hubris to strut around like latterday space 'pioneers’ (Ray-Bans, leather bomber jackets, exceedingly white teeth) while the world burns. Read the room #FFS.
About the director
Matt Soar is an uninvited settler living in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. His handmade films are often affective responses to regressive cultural politics. Grounded in a deep admiration for the rich histories of avant-garde filmmaking, Soar's films represent a tactical retreat from the digital dogma of early C21 'new' media. Screenings include ATA/OtherCinema, Fantasia Film Festival, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival, Black Hole Cinematheque, Pleasure Dome / CineCycle, VISIONS Montreal, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, and the Orphan Film Symposium.
Filmmaker's note
Billionaires... is the most recent creative outcome of Lost Leaders. For over a decade, this project has been driven by a singular fascination with film leaders and countdowns, treated as the forgotten 'metadata' of analogue film. For Soar, coming to terms with this residual technology has also involved cameraless hand-written animation, hand-woven film elements, stained glass, photomontage, and videomicroscopy. Soar's definitive introduction to the historical development of US/Canadian film leader standards appeared in the journal The Moving Image in 2016.